“Sure,” Alex said finally before rattling off a bank name and address, and turning to head back down the street. “Meet you there.”
****
“I don’t think we learned anything,” Finn declared when they got back to the hotel. “I think she’s just stringing us along, hoping we’ll pay her for doing nothing.”
“That’s the read you get on her?” Veruca asked, making him consider.
“Well … I dunno. She’s not nice, I can tell.”
“Everyone can tell, darling. I’m not sure she’s stringing us along. She got us access to the security tapes and the guards. They didn’t have anything helpful to say, nothing we didn’t already know. It was the same people who robbed the banks each time, and we know those men are—were—the family who once lived in the house we visited this morning. “
“Who were they?” Finn asked, realizing he’d never learned their names.
“I’m not sure, we’ve only got the one.”
“The girl?”
“Yes, I had her collected but haven’t gotten around to speaking with the funeral home yet.”
“And the others?”
“Still missing, so essentially they’re still nameless as well.”
Finn frowned, sad about the situation. This poor family had been murdered and used, and as far as the world was concerned, Finn was at fault. He didn’t like them being tossed aside, never identified, and would have found it distasteful even if he hadn’t been blamed. From the pictures on the walls of their house and the sentimental trinkets he’d come across while snooping, they’d seemed like good people.
“Will they get a funeral?”
“I believe that depends on the family. Once the girl’s been—” Veruca went tense suddenly and Finn jerked his head around, searching for whatever might have spooked her. After a moment, a smile pulled at her full lips and she patted his arm. “I can’t believe I forgot.”
“About what?”
“The fact that you’re a necromancer and she’s a corpse.”
Finn winced, hoping she wasn’t thinking what he suspected she was thinking.
****
“We should be at home in bed,” Finn said as they waited outside the funeral home. Veruca rubbed his arm.
“It’s barely dinner time, but we can be before long. This should go quick. You’ve been practicing after all.” Veruca winked at him, making sure he knew she understood the level of exaggeration to which he was prone.
“Sure, yeah. Lots of practice. It makes perfect after all. I practiced looking like this a lot.” Winking back, he leaned in, obviously trying to distract her from their mission. Instead of kissing him, she patted his cheek.
“Down, boy.”
Finn frowned, but Veruca could tell he’d noticed they were no longer alone.
The man coming to let them into the mortuary was tall, skinny as a straw, and visibly nervous. He hadn’t an ounce of fae blood in him, hadn’t been lent an extra soul, and yet worked openly and eagerly for one of Belial’s Dukes, and so by extension for Belial himself.
“You’re Veruca?” he asked, trembling as he tried to unlock the door.
“Good to meet you,” she said before gesturing to Finn. “This is Finn. We appreciate your help.”
“Of course. Yeah. I’m Garrett.” Finally getting the knob to turn and the door to open, he stepped over the threshold, but immediately rocked back and then forward before going still and looking at Veruca like he was worried he’d just horribly offended her. “I’m sorry, please come in—er, uh, ladies first.”
Veruca gestured for him to go before her, keeping her smile polite. She refused to show how funny she found it that he thought she might be dangerous. It wasn’t always clear what information was disseminated across Hell when it came to the powers and responsibilities of Reapers, but she was mostly treated as if she were as important and dangerous as Belial himself.
“Hopefully we didn’t interrupt your dinner,” she said once they’d moved through the building to the massive, cold stage room at the very back.
“Oh, it’s okay. I mean, you … I didn’t. I wasn’t … er, hungry.”
Veruca didn’t point out that his answer made little sense, instead choosing to look around at the bodies laid out and waiting to be processed for burial or wake.
“She’s here somewhere,” Garrett said, moving to check the metal tags on each of bodies twice before stopping in the middle of the chilled room and shaking his head. ”Let’s see. Amanda, right? Gleason, Amanda. She should be here.”
“Have you checked the log?”
“Right. Good.” Garrett snapped his fingers and pointed his finger, turning to view the room like a spinning weather vane. “Good.”
Veruca stayed still as Garrett moved to the shelf at the back to look through the clipboards and binders there. She could practically feel Finn’s tension, despite the fact that he’d stayed back near the door. Reaching out her hand, Veruca gestured for him to take it.
“Come, come.” Reluctantly, he shuffled in and grasped her hand in his own. She hadn’t the foggiest idea why he was still so nervous. He’d been raising the dead without incident for several months, and even if something were to go awry, he knew she had the power to pluck the soul out before the corpse could do any damage.
“She’s not here,” Garrett muttered, looking totally lost, as if he somehow knew what the words in front of him said, despite them being written in ancient Greek. “I don’t understand how. We haven’t called anyone. She’s marked as … here. But she’s not.”
“Was she picked up?”
“I didn’t call anyone,” Garrett said, looking around the room again.
“Would someone else have made the call? Perhaps not understanding what was at stake? Would she be anywhere else in the building?” Reconsidering, Veruca looked over the folder he held, hoping she could read something helpful even from where she stood a few feet away. “Do you have other locations? Perhaps she was dropped off at another mortuary.”
“No, she was here. No one’s called.” Garrett shook his head, though he didn’t elaborate.
“She’s not here? I don’t have to raise her?” Finn had perked up, practically dancing with relief.
“She has to be somewhere,” Veruca said, shaking her head.
“But she should be here,” Garrett said, staring at the paperwork as if something new would appear suddenly in bright, red ink, explaining how a corpse had disappeared from a secure building with no documentation. “She was here. I signed off, I put the tag on myself. I saw her.”
“Who else would know where she might be? Who can we call?”
“Serena was working too, but I’d told her—I’d talked to her. She knew what was—what was happening.”
“Explain to me what you told her,” Veruca said, trying her best not to be frustrated with Garrett’s disorientation. They were missing a body, one that could potentially lead them to a murderer who had put Finn in danger. Confusion was as useless as refusing to help altogether.
“Well, we were told to come—um, to go pick up the girl at … well, you know. At the house. So we went and picked her up.” Garrett met Veruca’s eyes and after a small pause, he seemed to realize that she was unhappy with him. He spoke a little faster, straightening up minutely as his spine tensed. “Then, we—well, brought her back here. She was identified and I put her tag on at the scene, and I signed off when we brought her in. I spoke with Serena, who’s in charge when I’m not around or when I’m busy. I told her that she wasn’t to be processed until we could get some more information on her.”
“You had her name,” Veruca said, taking the folder from Garrett’s hands and scanning the paperwork inside. He stood perfectly still, not moving when she removed the folder. He looked like a mime standing there with empty hands, but Veruca wasn’t in the mood for light entertainment. “There’s no contact information listed anywhere, so unless someone looked her up and made calls to the family without noting it, none of h
er family should have known she was here.”
“Her family?” Finn said, worry lacing his tone.
“They’re not local, except the family we saw at the bank.”
“The bank?” Finn asked, confused. Veruca nodded but didn’t explain. He’d realize she meant the zombies used to commit robbery, and if he didn’t she could always lay it out when they didn’t have Garrett around sputtering or staring slack-jawed at his hands.
“So someone has to have found her and picked her up, right? Your people didn’t just misplace a corpse.”
“Serena wouldn’t have.”
“You keep speaking for this woman, but it would be better for you call her. Can you ask her to come in so I can speak to her myself?” Reconsidering, Veruca closed the folder and caught Garrett’s eye intently. “Where were you that she was left to handle such a sensitive matter?”
“Here,” Garrett insisted, his voice going a little high. Beads of sweat popped up across his brow like mushrooms after a storm. “I was working. Here! No one mentioned anything to me, so they maybe might have possibly spoken to Serena, but she’s very good. She’s very good.”
“Good?”
“At her job, I mean. Very thorough. You have to be, you know, with … you know, what we do.”
Veruca shook her head, hoping Belial’s Duke had chosen Garrett for reasons other than his intelligence. Hell had humans in its pocket across the globe, all of them trusted with—and paid handsomely for—different tasks. Garrett wasn’t up to the usual standards, at least not as far as Veruca was concerned.
Finn was hanging back, having inched toward the doorway. He was quiet, probably nervous that Veruca might have him raise another body and hope to get answers out of it. Veruca turned to watch him silently, figuring she might as well look at his pretty face while considering what bad luck they’d had. The body, the one possible lead they had, was gone. Alex was doing her best, or so Veruca had to assume, but if Amanda Gleason’s body had any clues, raising her would have been an immediate way to get access to them.
Now it was possible they’d never know what she knew, and Veruca needed to learn why.
“Who has access? Who would have been able to get in here and take a body? Or…” Veruca said, turning back to Garrett and flattening her tone. “Should I be worried Miss Gleason got up, walked out on her own, and no one thought to mention it?”
“You think the necromancer took her?” Finn asked, pulling Veruca’s attention. She shook her head, opened her mouth to explain that she’d been joking, but immediately reconsidered. It wasn’t the stupidest thought he’d ever had, and Veruca was surprised at herself for not thinking of it.
“Do you have surveillance in here?” she asked after a moment, looking back to Garrett.
“I can get—well, not in here,” he said.
“I meant in the mortuary in general. The whole place, what could I see?”
“The doors, the lobby, not in the chapel. Um…”
“What d’you think’s happened?” Finn asked, rubbing Veruca’s elbow as if concerned she needed comforting.
“Your idea about the necromancer.” She figured mentioning the raising of the dead in front of Garrett was fine. Either he’d redeem himself and it wouldn’t be a problem for him to know about soul magic, or he’d be removed from play quietly and whatever he knew would be a moot point. “It makes a certain amount of sense.”
“Something I’ve said?” Finn asked, shaking his head, brushing off the idea entirely. “Not possible.”
Veruca felt her lip quirk at his joke but pressed on. “I’m not sure how, since no one should know where the body is except us, and people who should be trustworthy.” She caught Garrett’s eye to let him know she wasn’t sure he fit into that category anymore, and felt a little twinge of pity when his eyes widened in fear.
“The necromancer might know,” Finn said, lifting his hands and tapping his spot above the knuckles where he usually tied the string he used to connect him to the corpses he raised. “Unless you took the anchor.”
“Did you?” Veruca asked Garrett, feeling twice as stupid for not thinking of that either. “Was anything removed from the body?”
“No, no,” Garrett said intently before hesitating, unsure if that was the right answer. “I mean … we weren’t supposed to do anything except bring her back. Right? Like I said, no calls, or notifications, no police contact. Just … er … you know, storage.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time a body’s been raised a second time,” Finn pointed out, his voice soft as he slid his hand around to rub Veruca’s back. She considered that she was coming on pretty strong, blaming Garrett for the missing body as if he’d chucked it into rushing river just for the hell of it. When, really, they were dealing with a necromancer, after all. She’d already established that the necromancer was more powerful than she’d thought possible. Surely it wasn’t unheard of that the necromancer had raised the body again from a distance and found a way to get Amanda back.
“But why?” Veruca asked, stuck on that one point. What reason did the necromancer have for wanting Amanda’s body? Was it just to keep Finn from raising her and possibly getting answers? Had she seen the necromancer’s face before being murdered? Was the theft of her body just about keeping the necromancer from being identified?
“And how?” Finn asked, holding his hands up in surrender when Veruca frowned up at him. “I mean, really! How? Not that how, I know that how. But, you know, how? Like you said, someone would notice a dead girl walking out on her own. If the necromancer took her, he had to find a more secretive way than having her stroll through the lobby.”
“I need those surveillance tapes,” Veruca said.
“Yes, of course, we can—”
“Later,” Finn said, surprising Veruca.
“But they’re—” Garrett started. Finn looked to him, smiled, and clapped him on the shoulder. Veruca recognized his easy expression as his way of diffusing tension.
“It’s late, Gary. My lady and I should get some rest. It’s been a long day, and nothing we find out on these tapes is going to get us what we need right now.” Finn met Veruca’s eyes, pleading a little with his gaze. “Right, my love? So we see how the body got pilfered, then what? Is anything really going to be solved in the wee hours of the night? Shouldn’t we pay some care to ourselves so we’re at our best tomorrow?”
“Finn,” Veruca said, wanting to argue, wanting to make Garrett lead her to the surveillance cameras in case it would show the face of whomever had taken the body. No further argument came, though, as she realized he was right. Garrett was clueless, useless even. He wasn’t the one they needed to speak to, and anything they learned from the tapes would probably need explanation from the employees who’d actually witnessed something.
She shook her head, sighed, and nodded. “Fine. Tomorrow, though. Check the cameras, see what you find out, and call me. Get to the bottom of this, Garrett. Your position depends on it.”
Garrett nodded rapidly, letting Veruca know he understood she wasn’t just talking about his job as manager of the mortuary.
****
“Why would someone steal a body?” Finn asked quietly once they were in the car and headed back toward the hotel. Veruca took a second to answer, giving herself a chance to yawn. The day was rapidly catching up to her, making her feel heavy and tired. The thought that Belial had offered to let her pawn the investigation off on someone else sat quietly in the back of her head, but she wasn’t ready to let it go yet. The missing body was just another thread to pull, and it made her want to see how the whole problem looked unraveled.
“I’m guessing to keep you from raising her again.”
“Why me?”
“This person knows you, but we don’t know from where or why. We also don’t know how well. I can’t be the only person who knows about your secret skill.”
“You think someone else has heard me sing “Mickey” while wearing a cheerleading uniform?”
“As good as your Toni Basil impression is, I wasn’t referring to that.”
“Ah,” Finn said, frowning. The car went silent except for the soft music Erik had playing in the front seat, so Veruca took a breath and started trying to work it out in her own head. She turned her hand to clasp Finn’s and they sat like that for a few minutes. Erik glanced back at them in the mirror, giving an encouraging smile, though Veruca knew he was just picking up on the mood rather than eavesdropping. She’d decided firmly to keep him out of any further messes, though she still felt obliged to give him work since she was in town anyway. He’d tried to refuse her generous tips so far, but she had insisted. He had a new mouth to feed, after all. She wasn’t sure how much pigs ate, but if their reputation was anything to go off of, he was going to need a lot of extra cash.
“Why would the other necromancer take the body?” Finn asked, speaking the problem aloud as if the interior of the car would echo the answer back at them. “Just to keep us from learning something?”
“That’s where I’m stuck. Even if she was fresh enough that you could raise her and actually dig something out of her decaying brain, she probably knew nothing. Clark couldn’t see much, but he did see it was another zombie that killed her. There’s no way to know if she even saw the necromancer.”
“So we’re trying to find out why he would come back to collect her? Even assuming he’d done the smart thing and found a legitimate way to smuggle her body out, rather than zombifying her again and sending her out the front in a trench coat and fake mustache. That’s probably a lot of work, right? Paperwork to fill out, hoops to jump through. Why not just burn the place down?”
“Is that what you’d do?” Veruca asked, smiling at his thought process.
“To get rid of evidence? No. Not me.” Finn shook his head, thinking hard on the question. “But this guy’s not me, is he? I wouldn’t be raising people in the first place. I’d leave ‘em be. Best for everyone really.”
“You can still raise a charred corpse,” Veruca pointed out, pulling his hand into her lap and rubbing the goose bumps that had popped up all along his skin.
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